Re: PW#5-16: Use of /usr/src
Dale: you're the libc maintainer - are you following this discussion ?
The fundamental problem here is that Manoj wants kernel-headers-* for
development of weirdo programs which require particular kernel headers
to compile.
I don't think this is something that many people will need - after
all, the kernel is supposed to export a reasonably stable and
consistent interface. I think these packages, if they must exist,
should be in Extra so that users don't have large numbers of different
kernel-headers-* packages installed.
However, what's happened now is that the libc turns out to need a
package which is quite like kernel-headers-* in content but different
in packaging:
The package that libc uses should have a stable name, so that only one
version of it is used at once (and so that we don't have to have such
a tight coupling between libc header version and kernel portions,
which may make life easier). It also needs to be Priority: Standard.
It needs to be simple to install, and avoid asking questions or
automatically messing about with symlinks in /usr/src.
So, I contend that the same binary packages can't do this job. We
must create a new libc-headers package and then either discard
kernel-headers-* or not as we please.
Space is not too much of an issue here; we can easily afford to
duplicate this data once for the sake of a sane package arrangement.
On the other hand, these kernel-headers-* packages are not otherwise
of very widespread interest, and the people who would otherwise use
them can just as well use the ordinary kernel source (and delete
everything they don't want if they're short of space).
I don't mind how the _source_ packages are organised, but I think that
the libc headers are a core part of Debian and it's _much_ more
important to organise it sensibly than to cater for obscure tastes in
kernel-headers packages.
Ian.
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